A profile of youth offenders in Calgary

D. March 2008 The views expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Canadian Research Institute for Law and the Family, the City of Calgary, the Alberta Law Foundation, or the Calgary Police Service. [...] The objectives of this study are to: 1. identify how the implementation of the Youth Criminal Justice Act has affected the flow of cases through the youth justice system in Alberta and the workload for various components of the provincial youth justice system; 2. develop a model for predicting why some Calgary youth become serious habitual offenders (SHOs), while others do not; and 3. build a know [...] Methodology The objective of the first year of this three-year study of youth offending in Calgary was to establish the foundation of a model to predict why some youth become more seriously involved in crime than others. [...] On the other hand, while Chronic offenders and SHOs also received a significant number of community-based sentences, the large number of administration of justice charges (i.e., breaches, failure to comply) for these groups indicates tremendous difficulty in fulfilling the conditions of these types of sentences, possibly due to a lack of stability in the community and/or a greater investment in a [...] Given the richness of the data collected in Year 1 of the study, this project could only touch on the social background of the cohort of 123 youth who participated in the study.